Continuing Disney Productions

Plaque at the entrance that embodies the intended spirit of Disneyland by Walt Disney: to leave reality and enter fantasy

After Walt Disney's death, Roy Disney returned from retirement to
take full control of Walt Disney Productions and WED Enterprises. In
October 1971, the families of Walt and Roy met in front of Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom to officially open the Walt Disney World Resort.
After giving his dedication for Walt Disney World, Roy asked Lillian Disney to join him. As the orchestra played "When You Wish upon a Star",
she stepped up to the podium accompanied by Mickey Mouse. He then said,
"Lilly, you knew all of Walt's ideas and hopes as well as anybody; what
would Walt think of it [Walt Disney World]?". "I think Walt would have
approved," she replied.[105] Roy died from a cerebral hemorrhage on December 20, 1971, the day he was due to open the Disneyland Christmas parade.

1968 US postage stamp

During the second phase of the "Walt Disney World" theme park, EPCOT was translated by Disney's successors into EPCOT Center, which opened in 1982. As it currently exists, EPCOT is essentially a living world's fair,
different from the actual functional city that Disney had envisioned.
In 1992, Walt Disney Imagineering took the step closer to Disney's
original ideas and dedicated Celebration, Florida,
a town built by the Walt Disney Company adjacent to Walt Disney World,
that hearkens back to the spirit of EPCOT. EPCOT was also originally
intended to be devoid of Disney characters which initially limited the
appeal of the park to young children. However, the company later changed
this policy and Disney characters can now be found throughout the park,
often dressed in costumes reflecting the different pavilions.

Disney entertainment empire

Today, Walt Disney's animation/motion picture studios and theme parks
have developed into a multi-billion dollar television, motion picture,
vacation destination and media corporation that carry his name. Among
other assets The Walt Disney Company
owns five vacation resorts, eleven theme parks, two water parks,
thirty-nine hotels, eight motion picture studios, six record labels,
eleven cable television networks, and one terrestrial television
network. As of 2007, the company had annual revenues of over U.S. $35
billion.[106]

Disney Animation

Walt Disney was a pioneer in character animation. He was one of the first people to move away from basic cartoons with just "impossible outlandish gags"
and crudely drawn characters to an art form with heartwarming stories
and characters the audience can connect to on an emotional level. The
personality displayed in the characters of his films and the
technological advancements remain influential when animating today. He
was also considered by many of his colleagues to be a master storyteller
and the animation department did not fully recover from his death until
the late 1980s in a period known as the Disney Renaissance. The most financially and critically successful films produced during this time include Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994). In 1995, Walt Disney Pictures distributed Pixar's Toy Story, the first computer animated feature film. Walt Disney's nephew Roy E. Disney claimed that Walt would have loved Toy Story and that it was "his kind of movie".[107] With the rise of computer animated films a stream of financially unsuccessful Traditional hand-drawn animated
features in the early years of the 2000s (decade) emerged. This led to
the company's controversial decision to close the traditional animation
department. The two satellite studios in Paris and Orlando were closed, and the main studio in Burbank
was converted to a computer animation production facility, firing
hundreds of people in the process. In 2004, Disney released what was
announced as their final "traditionally animated" feature film, Home on the Range. However, since the 2006 acquisition of Pixar, and the resulting rise of John Lasseter to Chief Creative Officer, that position has changed with the largely successful 2009 film The Princess and the Frog.
This marked Disney's return to traditional hand-drawn animation and the
studio hired back staff who had been laid-off in the past. Today,
Disney produces both traditional and computer animation.

CalArts

In his later years, Disney devoted substantial time to funding The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Formed in 1961 through a merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute,
which had helped in the training of the animation staff during the
1930s, when Disney died, one-fourth of his estate went to CalArts, which
helped in building its campus. In his will, Disney paved the way for
the creation of several charitable trusts which included one for the
California Institute of the Arts and other for the Disney Foundation.[108] He also donated 38 acres (0.154 km2) of the Golden Oaks ranch in Valencia for construction of the school. CalArts moved onto the Valencia campus in 1972.
In an early admissions bulletin, Disney explained: "A hundred years ago, Wagner
conceived of a perfect and all-embracing art, combining music, drama,
painting, and the dance, but in his wildest imagination he had no hint
what infinite possibilities were to become commonplace through the
invention of recording, radio, cinema and television. There already have
been geniuses combining the arts in the mass-communications media, and
they have already given us powerful new art forms. The future holds
bright promise for those who imaginations are trained to play on the
vast orchestra of the art-in-combination. Such supermen will appear most
certainly in those environments which provide contact with all the
arts, but even those who devote themselves to a single phase of art will
benefit from broadened horizons."[109]

Thaumantrope

History of Animation

Some sources claim that the true origins of animation started with
cave men drawing on walls. Although there is some evidence that cave men
understood how to illustrate 2 dimensional images and imply motion from
one picture to another, there was no way to move these images rapidly
in sequence to imply motion in the drawing. ThaumatropeOne
of the first devices to do this was the Thaumatrope which used two
still images and persistence of motion to create a very simple
animation. The image on the left shows an example of a traditional
Thaumatrope. Instructions on how to make one can be found at http://www.randommotion.com/html/thauma.htmlThe Thaumatrope has also been created in other ways as seen on the right.

ZeotropeThe
Zeotrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides.
Beneath the slits, on the inner surface of the cylinder, is a band
which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a
set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins, the
user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the
cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from
simply blurring together, so that the user sees a rapid succession of
images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion
picture.

Praxinoscope

The
Praxinoscope was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud.
Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner
surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the
zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of
mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or
less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the
mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the
illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the
zoetrope offered.

In 1889 Reynaud developed the Théâtre Optique, an improved version
capable of projecting images on a screen from a longer roll of pictures.
This allowed him to show hand-drawn animated cartoons to larger
audiences, but it was soon eclipsed in popularity by the photographic
film projector of the Lumière brothers.